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Working with Paul Oertel

Writer's picture: Cliff DansaCliff Dansa

I was trying to return to civilization after five years as a tree planter, but it was a difficult transition. I was living in a rented room a couple of blocks from the 16th Street mall, the pedestrian mall through the center of Boulder, but I was only partially out of the woods. My few clothes were still in cardboard boxes on the floor and I still folded my sweater every night to serve as a pillow. I heard about a performance class that sounded interesting taught by a guy named Paul Oertel. I showed up.


In Paul’s class, the students would take turns doing a short piece, a song, a poem, one woman did puppetry, and then Paul would work with them for a while trying to help them connect more deeply with what they were doing. That first night, when it was my turn, I got up and did something, probably a guitar and voice piece. I finished and there was a silence. Paul asked, “So what do you want to do with this?”


“I don’t know.” I mumbled.


“Do you want to perform?”


“Well, that would be nice, but that’s really not the point.”


“Would you say that this is your path to enlightenment?” he asked.


“That would not be a false statement.” I replied.


“Great,” he said, and got out of his chair to do some hands-on work with me. We worked together in various contexts for seven years. Interestingly, this “path to enlightenment” phrase was never mentioned again in the time I worked with him. It provided us with a bit of conceptual structure as a starting point, but as we got to know each other better, it wasn’t really necessary. Also, this was the first time I acknowledged to anyone that I saw my music practice as a spiritual path, even though—as shown by my somewhat circuitous answer to Paul’s question—I couldn’t completely own it at the time.


Paul had an MFA in theater from NYU. He had studied with some of the giants of the avant-garde theater world, and while he acknowledged the value of everything that he had learned there, he would also talk about how hard that experience was for him on a human level. He said that when he finished his degree, he felt that he had lost all connection to the basic human experiences that had drawn him to theater and dance in the first place. He told us that he had made a commitment to himself to go into his studio every day for an hour, to lay in the middle of the floor, and to not move unless he felt a genuine inner motivation to do so. At first, he would just lay there for an hour and go back into the house. Then after a few days, he felt motivated to just move one finger, so he began to explore the movement of just that finger. Over time, more fingers became involved, and then finally his whole body, and he was able to reclaim his inherent love of body movement that he had lost while he was at NYU.


When I first started studying with Paul, he had a one-night-a-week class that met at a dance studio. He had developed the ability to intuitively see where a performer was blocking the energy in their body. He would use hands-on work, imagery, and instruction to help the performer open up their energy, which would then let the performance flow through. I particularly remember one night when he was working with a woman who had worked with him for years who was a pianist and fairly well-known piano teacher. She played a section of a Chopin piece on the not-quite-in-tune dance studio piano. Honestly, the piano was so out of tune that it was fairly unpleasant. Paul started working with her, doing a little work on her shoulders, but then focusing on getting her to connect her awareness to the energy line that runs down the inside of the leg, to the inside of the ankle and the arch of the foot (as a dancer, I’ve gotten to know that one well). Paul was having her play Chopin while he was lying on the floor under the piano bench holding on to the energy points on the inside of her heels. It was fairly comical to watch, Paul laying on the floor, giving instructions, the woman playing this incredibly intricate piano piece on the out-of-tune upright, and then suddenly, something shifted, and the piano got in tune and beautiful Chopin was coming out of it. I was sitting there hearing my head say, “That can’t have just happened,” but the experience was undeniable. Everyone in the class felt the shift and heard this difference in the sound of the piano.


Now I don’t think that if you had had some kind of electronic tuner in the room measuring the pitches coming out of the piano, that they actually shifted. Even I won’t go that far. The way that I have been able to make sense of this experience, integrating it with so many other experiences I had with Paul, is that the physically measurable sound vibrations are only part of what is going on in a musical performance. When a performer is integrated with their experience, there is an almost shamanic embodiment and transmission of energy.


Whether this happened this particular night through subtle changes in the way that this woman was playing the piano, or whether there was some sort of energetic mind-to-mind transmission that took place, I don’t know and I don’t care. Studying with Paul taught me, over and over again, that when a performer opens up their awareness and allows the energy of the moment to flow through them, when they drop their sense of “performing” and instead allow themselves to be “true to their experience” as Paul would often say, there is a dramatic shift in the audience’s experience. It’s not just an entertaining show; something real is happening.


This was the essence of Paul’s work and it has become a cornerstone of my artistic practice. How do we connect with this “something real” and embody it for ourselves and for the audience? It is difficult to put into words and it’s easier to talk about than it is to do. I worked with him like this for three or four years, first in the studio and then, when the studio closed, in a semi-private class that he put together with the regulars in the studio class. Although the work was focused on performance—my first wife, who was also in the class, and I had dreams of being successful performers—it was not focused on putting on a good show, it was focused on finding something deeper, something more honest, something real.


Not surprisingly, the energy lines that Paul would consistently be drawn to while working with his students turned out to be—when he studied some oriental medicine—very consistent with the energy meridians mapped out by Asian medicine, and the spots he was drawn to work with turned out to be major acupressure points where the meridians intersected. For my path, however, the more powerful part of this was when he started turning to the regulars in class after somebody had done their piece and asking, “What do you see?” When people were confused about what he meant by this, he would give them this little prompt. “Put your mind’s eye in your right hand. You can do that, right? Now put your mind’s eye in your left shoulder. Now put it in her left shoulder.” The first time I did that and was actually able to sense what was going on in another person’s body was mind-blowing for me. Over time, I and the other regulars in the group got pretty good at seeing where people’s energy was blocked. We would often meet on our own, without Paul, and work with each other. Although I’ve more or less lost my ability to do this due to lack of practice, this experience prepared me to work with energy in the ways I do now as a conscious dancer and musician.


Paul gradually began shifting his teaching away from hands-on body work and more toward imagery and verbal directions about how to work with energy. For example, I remember one time he had my first wife and I sing a duet standing back to back visualizing our voices meeting at a point about a foot above our heads. Whatever he did with me or with other members of the class, the focus was on being aware of our experience in the moment and allowing this awareness to come through in our performance. It was amazing how much this shift in attention changed the audience's experience of the event. Eventually the class ended for reasons I don’t remember, but he made a deep impression on me.


After Paul’s class ended, I worked with him off and on over the next few years in groups that he would organize. These groups would meet in a dance studio and improvise, sometimes to records that Paul would play (this was still the days of vinyl), sometimes to our own singing, sometimes to silence. Occasionally, I would bring in my banjo or someone else would bring in a keyboard. These groups were the seed for my own improv group that I formed a couple years later.


Eventually He moved to France and I didn’t see him for decades. During that time, I would sometimes find myself wanting to get his feedback on something I was working with. I would ask myself, “What would he tell me?” I always had a sense of the direction his guidance would lead.

More recently, as COVID pushed everything online, I realized that since everything was online, I was no longer restricted to working with teachers who lived near me. I reconnected with Paul and we’ve been doing some online sessions. It’s been great to work with him again after almost three decades. Reconnecting with him has caused me to reflect on how he influenced me. He appeared at a pivotal time in my life, had a good sense of who I was and what I was trying to do, gave me some important pieces of the puzzle, gave me a nudge, and let me go. He showed me where to look, how to explore. I took it from there and it has been, and continues to be, an interesting journey.


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